July 2, 2019

Not quite the swing-for-the-fences sophomore audacity you might expect from the guy who made Hereditary — but certainly a film that never would have made it into the marketplace, as-is, without being anticipated as such — Ari Aster’s Midsommar is nonetheless very much in character: a gorgeous, tightly controlled, and deeply self-satisfied jerk-off poster child for a new wave of arthouse-inflected genre films that see deliberation as dread, and formal precision as a replacement for crafting actual narrative suspense. Florence…

Given Mindy Kaling’s standing as a woman of color with an established career in television — as an actress and a producer/creator — one might think that Late Night would be a slam dunk. Working from her own screenplay, Kaling plays Molly, a young,…

Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery (which first premiered in 2016, but is only now getting a release Stateside this year, thanks to the streaming platform Mubi) is a descent into the vagaries of national identity, history, and revolution as seen through…